cheese it, the cops!

I'll figure this thing out eventually

The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I've spent much of my career on this question of the various relations of representations and reality. It was the topic of my dissertation, which was an attack on the claim that reality is a product of or is constructed by means of or just is pictures or words, a position I associated with my supervisor, Rorty, and with his heroes, including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Dewey. The question of realism in representation (and an implicit argument that representations by and large derive from rather than create the antecedent reality) is everywhere in my work, including essays in End Of Story, How to Escape (actually drawn from the work on Entanglements, then in process), and elsewhere. It is central to my work on race in Act Like You Know and I work through the issues explicitly from many angles in Political Aesthetics. I was writing about it in my high school journals. I do not know why these questions so obsess me!

Some other treatments, from splicetoday:

Looks Like Me

King Meets Zuckerberg

PC Entertainment as Medieval Allegory 

The Magical (really, magical) Power of Words

[my pre-emptive apology for all this]

more on the gettysburg trustee situation and the sense of community that we have on campus these days.

Yes, I am absorbing slightly-veiled and not-at-all-veiled accusations of anti-semitism in the email, etc. Can I help you out with some rudimentary points? It is not sensible to ban certain symbols, or to respond to them as though they meant exactly the same thing in every context or in every presentation. So, you could present swastikas with an intention and in a context in which they express ecstatic love of National Socialism. Right. Or you could show a Nazi flag and then set it on fire, for example, or wipe your ass with it. You could be Leni Riefenstahl, trying to motivate agreement with your fiendish propaganda. Or you could be Charlie Chaplin or Mel Brooks, parodying or ridiculing these same symbols and the idiot-monsters who wield them. In the one case, the symbol means anti-semitism, among other things; in the other, the same symbols help create an anti-anti-semitic message.

Nor should we ban Riefenstahl's movies, obviously, or regard screening them as an anti-semitic act. Another potentially non-problematic or actively-good use of these symbols is in documentation. Like, say we were attempting to show the reality of the Holocaust. You would have to screen the whole symbol system too, and everyone does. Bits of Riefenstahl's propaganda films appear in almost every documentary about Nazism, and in every account of its history. You want to know what that Nuremberg rally looked like. You want to know how the Nazis wanted themselves to be understood. Where once they came to adore, now we come to revile. The images do not come pre-interpreted, and they do not come out radiating evil in virtue merely of their sheer shape or something; I really do think people are going straightforwardly supernaturally magical on this. 

I just do not regard that swastika, in this context of a bunch of frat boys at a Hogan's Heroes party, as an anti-semitic expression at all. It's a completely different situation and hence meaning than the same symbols would have at a rally of the American Nazi Party, but also they don't actually look the same either.  Many people, thinking about this, might be comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking as they freaked out so cruelly. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good.

Now, in order to be a member of community or institution x, you're saying not only that I must produce only the approved symbols in the approved order, but that I must accept a certain overall view about the relation of representations to reality: namely that representations (pictures, films, texts, symbols) are extremely potent reality-alterers. Otherwise I'm a bigot? Seems unlikely really. Now this is really a tough thing to demand of a philosophy prof: accepting a metaphysical system that contradicts the one I've spent the last 30 years building. Really, seriously, I spent 5 years arguing with Richard Rorty on this one. (True, I lost that argument pretty badly; now I'm ready for him though. Ah, too late.) At any rate, I am going to need a list of all the various doctrines that I am called upon to accept, an exhaustive enumeration of all the prohibited ideas, and so on. If there is one target of 'Entanglements: A System of Philosophy,' it is the representational theory of mind. Also I sort of think this world is a real concrete physical environment, not a flicker of images in the theater of the mind, or a narrative or linguistic construction. Sorry?

 

MMA: philosophy vs physics

I do see signs that physics is coming to its senses, or sort of trying to scrutinize its own Hegelian Idealism critically. It doesn't really have the tools, though. Man it's been a long sad tale of bald logical contradictions and 'we're-living-in-an-hallucination' horseshit. A few links from my back-in-the-day attempts to bodyslam.

what's gone wrong with physics

so, so wrong

miserably, horribly wrong. wrong.

did you know that reality itself is the result of an idealized observer stipulated by physicists? (plus they think they proved that by experiment or something)

Stephen Hawking: prince of a guy, miserable philosotaster

The sad thing is that philosophers deferred to physicists as authorities through the whole 20th century, and let them get away with murder, really, even when the jive was uberblatant.

I think the principle of theory choice has been, not: what is the most modest or plausible conclusion we can draw from these particles going through these slits, but what will make outsiders go "that's so cool! that's so trippy!" They're really good at math, though.

 

 

 

 

Hogan's Heroes claims another victim

 

Me in the WSJ on the "resignation" of a trustee of Gettysburg College  due to a yearbook pic of him at a Hogan's Heroes costume party at the college in 1980. 

What it's like on campus: everyone is surreptitiously watching everyone else, hoping to catch each other in a lapse (while also rummaging all the yearbooks, old school newspapers, instagram feeds &c, looking for victims). When we fancy we have something, we turn on one another, snarling, and try to mobilize the college to extrude or permanently discredit one another. Students turn on students. Students turn on faculty. Faculty turn on students. Administrators turn on students. Faculty turn on faculty. [I will link or describe all these sorts of cases if you like.] And, unbelievably, presidents turn on trustees, driven to that point by the general snarling. Also the things they're catching people doing are, in many cases, insanely trivial, and the theory underlying the whole thing about the relation of representation to reality is baldly ridiculous. Look, obviously all of this is incompatible with these institutions' stated purposes. The average college campus right now is just precisely the opposite of a community.

Believe it or not, I take myself to be telling people to come together, and back to the basic institutional mission.

I like to imagine what the discussion has been like about the situation at the development office at Gettysburg, and comparable institutions, as they contemplate handing money back for no reason at all. Ringring: "I'd like to endow your new building, but if I do you'll mobilize the whole campus to rummage through every snapshot of me ever taken, pitching me eventually into the dunk tank/septic system. Going with Doctors Without Borders this year."

'Hogan's Heroes' ridiculed the Nazis. To do that, it needed to depict Nazis. I'm thinking that #gettysburgcollege might well have a literature professor or two who could run the students and admin through the rudiments of textual interpretation. Punching Nazis was sort of popular a couple of years ago. And since 1930, ridiculing and parodying them has been a central dimension of attack. Now, evidently, ridiculing and parodying Nazis is verboten, as it were: it's anti-semitic. The approach is puzzling.

Let's say that many people at GC are having thoughts along these lines, and not only in Development. Can they express them? If you were an untenured prof, would you express your reservations? (Unfortunately, timidity does not wear off with tenure.) What would happen to you as a student if you objected to this whole approach strongly? What would people call you? Now, you are creating an atmosphere where everyone pretends to agree. Look around you. I say you don't know whether any of these people agree with you or not, no matter how vociferously they may be nodding along. Meanwhile, the only means you have to address things like this is to provide 'opportunities' for frank, honest, open dialogue. Are you sure you're not just trying to lure people into a misstatement or inadvertent self-revelation, so you can gasp? I might not be attending.

['The sign of the Double Cross']

I'm a bit concerned that y'all aren't fighting oppression or injustice at all, just pictures of it. Quite the waste of energy.

The offending image is very much in the same genre as those above, I feel. Many people, thinking about this, are comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good. Like, why am I having to point this out?

[unpaywalled]

 

Self-Reliance, Servility, and Mental Health

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson's incandescent essay "Self-Reliance" of 1841 has long been regarded as a fundamental statement of American values, a manifesto picking up where the Declaration of Independence left off. Perhaps you've heard some of the famous bits: "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." "The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of death, and afraid of each other." According to the explicit guidelines of the American Psychological Association, however, the values expressed in "Self-Reliance" are obsolete and pathological.

"Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct," writes an APA committee, in a prose style that enacts its own point and which stands in opposition to Emerson's writing in every dimension. "The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness." Later in the guidelines the committee adds "components of traditional masculinity" including "not showing vulnerability," "competitiveness," and, of course, "self-reliance."

When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and placed great value on dissent and independence of thought, even in cases where one might pay a social price for it. They understood by hard experience that dependence makes you vulnerable, even if we all do need to depend on one another in various ways. They saw value in questioning the norms and authorities by which one is surrounded; they insisted that each human individual is unique and of incomparable value.

For example, many feminists from before Emerson's era through the 1970s taught that women must become less dependent on men. Abigail Adams advised wives on how to become financially independent from their husbands, that is, on how to be more self-reliant. That women in patriarchy could not be self-reliant was one of the central objections to it, and one of the key factors that made resistance difficult.

If you depend on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are currently at the mercy of Donald Trump, though it was very nearly Hillary Clinton. And as Thoreau argued in "Civil Disobedience," if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it.

Emerson's essay is about self-development and self-realization, things that the APA in another mood might praise, albeit in words to which it would be impossible to attend. And it is about the value, for each of us individually and for our society as a whole, of independent thought, a value that the APA has no terms to express. Even more than in Emerson's time, we think in groups or as groups. This makes many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold, or engage in a process of self-deception in which we come to hold them. It turns us into tribes of warring conformists. It is servile. Also, according to the American Psychological Association, it represents a desirable state of mental health. Well, there's no denying the best patients are the most . . . compliant.

By implication, the APA is viciously characterizing femininity, which they must in the nature of things regard as the opposite and complement of the masculinity they attack. They aver that feminine people are dependent, conformist, passive, obedient, disindividuated, vulnerable, opposed in principle to self-sufficiency, hyper-sensitive. Those features would, by implication, be marks of mental health, and an aid to moving toward a decent society. They choose up sides in the gender wars, but it might be more useful to think of the masculine/feminine pair as a complex problem and resource, or at worst a single binary pathology, than as boys-against-girls battle over the nature of mental health. But, down to it, none of this is about health at all, really, or it's only about 'health' as a synonym for 'goodness.'

Though this is perhaps not what it takes itself to be doing, the APA in fact is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Ralph Waldo Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was quite aware of it. These values are exquisitely opposed to one another, another sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it once was. On the other hand, in diagnosing stoicism as a dysfunction, the APA boldly takes sides with the epicureans in the controversy that still attends hellenistic philosophy. I'm going with the cynics myself.

"The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature," writes Emerson in his gendered way. "A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you."

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

 

 

The Truth About Truth

Dan Kaufman and I talk about the nature of truth as understood in philosophy and then about the nature of philosophy, among other matters, on his Sophia show on meaningoflife.tv. I like the way he frames it: from very similar data we draw opposite conclusions. Then again, they may not be so opposite after all. We end up kind of probing about on various matters, while getting the essential structure out fairly clearly, I hope.

I am proud of the work on truth in Entanglements. Lord knows it raises as many questions as it dispenses with. Still, a sort of new start, I feel. It would be hard to really give the whole picture in a vid or in an hour.

What May I Hope?

Gloss on the latest WSJ piece, on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Psychological Association, in a contest for the very soul of America. The APA has already decisively won the contest for the very prose style of America, in which, for example, the passive voice in the long run will replace the active voice, as passive people will replace active people. Thinking of it as a direct inversion of the values of people such as Emerson and Thoreau sheds some light on the real project.

The DSM is a moral guide, or a moral theory, or a moral program. It addresses the questions "What sort of person should I be?" "How should I treat others?" "How should I behave?" "What shall I believe?" "For what may I hope?" Now in this regard it has some drawbacks. It flubs the fact/value distinction, for one thing. The authors do not seem to be aware that they are presenting a moral theory, or at any rate they definitely don't want their readers to be aware of that. It is a bewildering nest of inadequately theorized concepts, hardly even put in relation to one another.

If Emerson attracted and inspired readers with the intensity and beauty of his writing and ideas, the APAs disseminates its values largely as a matter of institutional enforcement. Where Emerson wanted to set your mind alight, the APA wants to set it right, chemically. I wonder what percentage of people who end up consulting psychologists are effectively being required to do so. Emerson was taking only volunteers.

Replacing virtue and vice with health and illness is a merely verbal shift; the concepts perform quite the same task and are intended to shape each and all of us. And coming down to it, I'm afraid the moral prescription is literal: hope for pills.

The Washington Post Opinion Page and the CIA: No distance

One of the most disturbing contemporary media zones is the Washington Post opinion page. It is just very very close to the "intelligence community," as Jeff Bezos is building the information infrastructure for American intelligence agencies; the initial contract seems to be worth some $800 million (links below). They've recently hired a former CIA director as a columnist, which strikes me as bizarre; I'm wanting independent voices, myself. Here he calls for Trump to stop insulting the CIA, an utterly dominant theme of the whole opinion operation for years now. "Trump is playing with fire when he insults intel": it sounds vaguely like a threat, coming straight from the heart of the CIA. Is that how the Post editorial board thinks about opinion journalism? The columns of Max Boot - who has written that Morell column word for word for years himself -  often appear to have almost been dictated by intel sources. The editorial board itself defends intel continuously, in exactly the same terms that it defends itself. 

On many days, it appears to be something like a full annexation. It's partly a matter of regulatory capture: they think they're cultivating sources but the sources are cultivating them. It's a particular danger for a DC news operation, but they seem not to be resisting at all, and it occurs to me to wonder why. When I first started tweeting in this vein, I was like: I just hope that the CIA doesn't store its data with Bezos and didn't follow his divorce too closely, harhar. Did a quick Google, and it's far worse than I could have imagined: the problem is underpinned by an extreme conflict of interest to the tune of billions as the years go by. I'm sorry, I guess I think the Post editorial board should be in a crisis. Let's get this precise: The problem isn't the appearance of a conflict of interest. There is a conflict of interest. The problem is the extremely vivid appearance that this conflict is distorting the journalism. 

a few items:

Intel chiefs strike a blow for truth

Reasons to worry

I was in the CIA, stop insulting me, or something bad might happen

"undercutting the intelligence community is literally a life-or-death matter"

The informed assessments of the president’s intelligence chiefs disagree with Trump’s uninformed or misinformed prejudgments

So then you start going through the foreign affairs columns of Jackson Diehl or David Ignatius or Fred Hiatt, as well as all the editorials, looking for moments where the positions they are expressing are not, more or less, what one suspects are the views of the intelligence establishment, on Syria, say, or Ukraine, or Venezuela. Right now, I'm afraid I'm not seeing any. One problem with being an intelligence official is that you can't publicly express your views. Fortunately, however, you have The Washington Post opinion page. It would be terrible to accuse David Ignatius - who I've read for many years - of not speaking for himself. But the whole way the Post is operating is undermining his credibility and that of everyone involved.  

The Post people might ponder how they themselves regard media operations which are evidently very close to the intelligence agencies in their respective countries. They might think about the overall effect of the secret police here and there, now and then, on journalism. Seek the light, y'all.

Washington Post, I am saying this for your own good. I've been reading you since I was a child. My grandfather was a White House correspondent and political columnist for you (and my grandmother your film critic). Ask yourself: what would Meg Greenfield say? Tell the shade of Mary McGrory that you're hiring columnists now straight from Langley.

 

 

Lule of Raw

 

ICE ran fake university in Michigan. The claim that 'no one is above the law' can't endure a moment's honest scrutiny. It is impossible not to exempt the authorities from the laws they enforce. Here, it's laws against fraud. If you arrested all the ICE people involved and charged them with fraud, on what grounds other than 'We're exempt from the laws' could they claim innocence? That's a decent definition of a government: people who are to one extent or another, or in the performance of their official functions, exempt from the laws they enforce: against theft, kidnapping, killing people (in war), etc.. No advocate of the rule of law can, consistently with that position, not be an anarchist. Chew on that.

As I keep saying, people's commitment to the various arguments for and pictures of state legitimacy just steamrollers their rationality. Like you can blandly or inspiringly go 'rule of law' all day, but only by ignoring the roiling contradictions underneath, which are under your nose. It's not about what's true or what makes sense, it's about what people need to believe and what they want other people to believe, in order to control them. Before you head down this road (or down the road of social contract theory, for example), just acknowledge that the apparent appeal to reason, Enlightenment values, and so on, is not at all where this is actually coming from.